Update, November 2014: These days, I’m hosting my own vanilla minecraft server on Linode, using MCMyAdmin for a web interface. I finally did it. I broke down and rented a Minecraft server. Previously, I had hosted a Minecraft server pretty successfully on my personal web server. The problem became two-fold: it was a huge time-sink, as updating all the plugins that I was running took a long time at each release. Also, while hosting the Minecraft server, my server would often become unresponsive, requiring a restart. This was unacceptable, as I also host a Teamspeak 3 server, an IRC bouncer, and multiple websites from my server. I needed maximum uptime! So I finally shut down my Minecraft server for good. ...

This is a great article by a guy over at Github about slide design. He makes some really good points, and his slides really are beautiful. I want to see more presentations with these design pointers in mind.

More on SOPA and Protect-IP (Don’t break the internet!) As I said in my previous post, SOPA (the Stop Online Piracy Act) and Protect-IP are both very bad pieces of legislation. They are not only technically damning for the internet, but they are unconstitutional. When I started doing my due diligence the other day with regards to these bills, I didn’t know much about them. After some research, though, I have discovered just how bad these bills are. Here’s some more information, in a post by Adam Savage (from MythBusters). ...

I’ve heard a lot of chatter about SOPA (the Stop Online Privacy Act), which is currently going through congress. However, today I finally decided to look into it. And I definitely didn’t like what I found. Here’s a video summing up the problems (the video is for the Protect IP act, which was introduced earlier this year, but most of the same problems apply to both bills). (Found via Matt Cutt’s Blog ...

My iPhone 4S came this last week. Previously, I was a proud owner of the HTC Evo 4G, a great phone. But still I switched. Since I’ve had a few people ask me why, I decided I’d better just blog it. Sorry for my rambling. Both platforms have their advantages. I suppose I’ll go platform by platform and examine some pros and cons: iOS With iOS 5, an iPhone was finally a valid alternative to my Android phone. Previously, I never would have switched, because of the lack of a good notifications system. If a push notification came in, it would interrupt whatever you were doing, sometimes to the effect of restarting your progress in a game or something. This in and of itself was an annoyance, but could be overlooked. The main problem was that once a notification popped, if didn’t immediately go to that app and take care of it, it was gone. Poof. You couldn’t decide to leave this or that notification for later, because they weren’t being stored anyplace. That all changed with Notification Center in iOS 5. ...

My good friend Chad recently started learning about Python. After getting a fair bit into a book on the subject, he posted on Google+: Language seems cool, though I haven’t found a compelling reason to need it. I think Django is the main reason I want to use it. Calling upon the powers of +Julio Carlos Menendez and +Colton Myers to give me some examples where using Python is WAY better than another language. ...

I use vim. Vim is a 20-year-old text editor, based on the 35-year-old “vi” editor (pronounced vee-eye, not vie). vi and emacs are both part of an editor holy war that has been going on for decades. I discovered this holy war years ago, mentioned on some website or another, and started to research. I tried both editors briefly, and then decided to take vim’s side of the holy war. At the time, this pick was kind of arbitrary – I really didn’t know enough about the two editors to make a truly educated decision. I think I saw vim as the underdog in the war, and as the more interesting of the two editors, with it’s strange idea of separate modes for text entry and for commands. ...

I recently found a “poem” about the philosophies of Python. It pretty well embodies the reasons behind my recently acquired love of Python: The Zen Of Python Beautiful is better than ugly. Explicit is better than implicit. Simple is better than complex. Complex is better than complicated. Flat is better than nested. Sparse is better than dense. Readability counts. Special cases aren’t special enough to break the rules. Although practicality beats purity. Errors should never pass silently. Unless explicitly silenced. In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess. There should be one—and preferably only one—obvious way to do it. Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you’re Dutch. Now is better than never. Although never is often better than right now. If the implementation is hard to explain, it’s a bad idea. If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea. Namespaces are one honking great idea – let’s do more of those! ...

Here we go again. I mean, seriously. You’ve gotta be wondering, “Why does he even keep trying?” This has to be my 6th or 7th attempt at a blog. Shouldn’t I just give up already? Well this time I’m trying something a little bit different. I’m going to blog about technology, rather than my personal life. Obviously I’ll try to throw some personal life stuff in there, but the problem is, I don’t feel like my life is interesting to write about, and thus I have a hard time staying interested in the writing, and I assume others have a hard time staying interested in the reading. Those of you who aren’t “techies” out there, I hope you’ll still come read a little. I think you’ll find some interesting stuff. And who knows, if I can keep up interest in a tech blog, maybe I’ll be able to make and keep a personal blog too. ...

Like I mentioned in the last post, I’m taking a little bit of a different approach with this blog. Rather than try to blog about my life, which, in my opinion, leads to rapid loss of interest both on my part and the part of my readers, I’ve decided to focus on something that I’m actually interested in (and I hope interests a few of you): technology. Specifically, computers. I got pulled in at a pretty young age. First it was the computer games – Load Runner on our black-and-white Macintosh; later, Warcraft 2 on our 486. It just escalated from there. I still play a lot of video games (my parents will tell you that I play way too much, and they’re probably right), but the less… flashy end of computing pulled me in, slowly but surely, as time went on. ...